Martin Luther King Sr.

Martin Luther King Sr. (19 December 1899-11 November 1984) was an American Baptist pastor and an early figure in the Civil Rights movement; he was also the father of the famous civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr..

Biography
Martin Luther King Sr. was born "Michael King" on 19 December 1899 in Stockbridge, Georgia, into a family of one-eighth Irish and seven-eighths African-American descent. King led the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and became the head of the local NAACP chapter, becoming involved with the Civil Rights movement. King fought for equal teachers' salaries and took part in a 1920s boycott of the Atlanta bus system to challenge the Jim Crow laws, and he became an affiliate of the Republican Party, whose southern wing tended to be progressive. King encouraged his son, Martin Luther King Jr., to also become a civil rights activist, and King Sr. would switch his support to the Democratic Party when Robert F. Kennedy convinced a local judge to release King Jr. from prison after he was arrested for taking part in a peaceful sit-in. In 1969, King was held hostage by Samuel L. Jackson and other Morehouse College students, who forced the faculty to change the curriculum. In 1974, King's wife Alberta was murdered by an anti-Christian black man who had attempted to kill King himself at Ebenezer Church, which distressed King, who had already lost his son to a bullet and his other son to drowning. In 1976, King helped Jimmy Carter with building a coalition of black and white voters, and he died in 1984 at the age of 84.